A couple of earlier threads are resurrected herein due to renewed
interest in _Edison's Conquest of Mars_.

Ted wrote:
>Don wrote:
>>James wrote:
>>> Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss
>>>
>>> https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/terrible-swift-sword
>>
>> ... The War of the Worlds rewritten and dumbed down by persons
>> unknown in order to better suit Yankee sensibilities. ...
>>
>> ... Edison’s Conquest of Mars was rescued from well-deserved
>> obscurity in the 1970s by Forry Ackerman. He needed
>> inexpensive, sub-par material with which to pad out Ace's
>> dreadful translations of the Perry Rhodan space opera series. ...
>>
>>Allow me to put a finer point on your first sentence. Yankee
>>[redacted] [9] sensibilities, if you please.
>> Ace #50~#59 was initially acquired and read by me to determine PR's
>>suitable for me. Later issues contain the padding that you mention.
>> PR fits my tastes, so the earliest, non-padded, issues were
>>acquired. Forry does a fair job of addressing the remainder of your
>>comments.
>>
>> _ace #11 PR The Planet of the Dying Sun_
>>
>> "The Perryscope"
>>
>> ROSS PAVLAC is 20, a junior at Ohio U., majoring in computer
>> science, president of the campus sf club and a reader of
>> science fiction since the 3rd grade. He has some harsh
>> criticisms:
>>
>> PR is typical space opera, poorly written with
>> a minimum of of characterization and many plot
>> elements carried to idealistic extremes. A book
>> that is written with a mediocre style turns into
>> trash when translated by a mediocre translator
>> who has an interest in the material being
>> translated but no real writing talent. I
>> apologize for slinging names at Wendayne Ackerman
>> but feel you are guilty of nepotism in the first
>> degree in making Mrs. Ackerman the official
>> translator.
>>
>> (Forrest Ackerman speaking. Let's interrupt right
>> here. In the first place, Wendayne was Donald Wollheim's
>> choice; one of the authors of the series tried his hand
>> at a translation but ACE's Editor-in-Chief preferred
>> Mrs. A. - and so, incidentally, did the originators of
>> PERRY RHODAN. Mr. Pavlac tells us he took 2 years of
>> German in high school, from which lofty level he
>> criticizes our translator, who was born to the German
>> tongue, received a magna cum laude Master's Degree in
>> German Lit. in America, has been using English for over
>> a quarter of a century, teaches German - and French -
>> at college level, and was reading Zukunftsromane -
>> future fiction - long before Mr Pavlac was born. The
>> Defense rests - except to quote the old but applicable
>> cliché that "you can't make a purse out of a sow's ear,"
>> so don't criticize the translator because Perry Rhodan
>> isn't Ensign Flandry or an Andre Norton astronaut or
>> written with the flair of A. Bertram Chandler or John
>> Rackham.)
>
> The translations were certainly not "dreadful". The next try at English
> distribution in the early 00s or late 90s *read* like it was translated
> from German.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Edison's Conquest of Mars_ (Serviss) was first serialized 1898. [1][2]
It's now available both as an e-book [3] and as an audio book [4].
(Presumably the e-book and audio book deliver the story as originally
written, prior to Ackerman's 1969 edit.)
After an initial battle on Mars, Earth's expeditionary force
retreats to Deimos, the smaller of Mars' moons, with a mean radius of
6.2 km. Although the story's illustrations show earthlings breathing
Martian air, it's unclear whether Deimos has breathable air.

"Im Banne des Hypno" [5] depicts my favorite solar system rock,
colloquially called "Monterny's world." It's an asteroid planetoid with
a diameter just under eighty kilometers. Although it has no atmosphere
mutant master Monterny jumps for joy on it. [6]

"Kepler's Somnium" (1634) [7][8] is an early example of "science fiction
before the genre." In the story, humans insert damp sponges into their
nostrils in order to breath on Earth's moon.

Note.
[1] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?20773
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison's_Conquest_of_Mars
[3] https://archive.org/details/edisonsconquesto21670gut
[4] https://librivox.org/edisons-conquest-of-mars-by-garrett-p-serviss/
[5] https://crcomp.net/arts/pr0027/index.php
[6] https://www.perrypedia.de/mediawiki/images/c/cb/PR0027Illu_4.jpg
[7] https://archive.org/details/den-kbd-pil-130011021345-001
[8] https://www.bookdepository.com/Keplers-Somnium-Edward-Rosen/9780486432823

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Someone, Jack Bohn perhaps, previously pigeonholed _Conquest of Mars_ as
an Edisonade.

[9] "Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a
man." In the end, it's almost as vexatious to discover my own
proclivity for excessive alliteration and affected prose may mark
me as a dreadful euphuist. LOL. It takes one to know one, they
say. ROTFLMAO.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

Among the things Don wrote:
> A couple of earlier threads are resurrected herein due to renewed
> interest in _Edison's Conquest of Mars_.
>
<whew> I had thought Nicoll had reread the whold thing and dashed a column out at inhuman speed.
>
> Someone, Jack Bohn perhaps, previously pigeonholed _Conquest of Mars_ as
> an Edisonade.

To me, it sounds like like somethng I could possibly say, but would be unlikely to. (I knew of a "Robinsonade" as in _Robinson Crusoe_ and that Swiss Family.)

I see above I ascribe to Ray Cummings an honor I recently gave to Ray Palmer. How ChatGPT of me. I'm going to assume the earlier me had the book to hand.

--
-Jack

Jack Bohn wrote:
> Don wrote:
>> A couple of earlier threads are resurrected herein due to renewed
>> interest in _Edison's Conquest of Mars_.
>>
> <whew> I had thought Nicoll had reread the whold thing and dashed a
> column out at inhuman speed.
>>
>> Someone, Jack Bohn perhaps, previously pigeonholed _Conquest of Mars_ as
>> an Edisonade.
>
> To me, it sounds like like somethng I could possibly say, but would be
> unlikely to. (I knew of a "Robinsonade" as in _Robinson Crusoe_ and
> that Swiss Family.)
>
> I see above I ascribe to Ray Cummings an honor I recently gave to Ray
> Palmer. How ChatGPT of me. I'm going to assume the earlier me had the
> book to hand.

Indeed. How ChatGPT of me to assume you said it. (And how human of
ChatGPT in turn (as Christian more-or-less noted elsewhere) to "fake it
til you make it." BTW, ChatGPT's core competency seems to be in its role
as a conversation piece of s...oftware.)
Enough BS - it's time for genuine effort. A search of my private
usenet spool (find . | xargs grep 'Edisonade') ultimately reveals this
interesting (to me), rasw provenance:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 20091203 Robert Carnegie wrote:

I know I recently mentioned _Edison's Conquest of Mars_ - on casual
inquiry it's one of a genre of "Edisonades", just as there were
"Robinsonades" based on _Robinson Crusoe_, of which _The Swiss Family
Robinson_ is conspicuous. I think /that/ term is German. I don't
know whether "Edisonades" always featured Thomas Edison himself, or
whether e.g. the original Tom Swift counts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 20150715 Sea Wasp wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans does mostly fantasy, but he recently self-published
an absolutely lovely YA Edisonade titled _Tom Derringer and the Aluminum
Airship_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 20150827 Sea Wasp wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans is one of my favorite authors, and he nails this one
perfectly.

The initial, spoiler-free review: _Tom Derringer and the Aluminum
Airship_ is a nigh-perfect recapturing of the spirit of pulp and,
really, pre-pulp adventure fiction. Not really steampunk, but close to
it, this is more an Edisonade or a Vernian homage in a sense. The
language and setting evoke those of the older works, while avoiding the
overly-intrusive narration which sometimes will mar older works for new
readers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 20200517 Robert Woodward wrote:

The first Interstellar Patrol story ("Crashing Suns") appeared in Weird
Tales in the same month that _Skylark of Space_ appeared in Amazing
Stories. So, declaring _Skylark..._ as the first is a bit iffy (true,
the first draft was written almost a decade earlier). Besides,
_Skylark.._ was the first Superscience story and was in many ways an
Edisonade (as was much of the early John W. Campbell).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 20210523 dsr wrote (in regards to "Triplanetary"):

It borders on the Edisonade, in which a plucky scientist-inventor (usually accompanied
by a few more or less hardworking assistants) discovers a new thing and immediately
turns it into a pile of cool gizmos - typically a space drive, a weapon and a
defense. Then they have adventures, some of which may demand further inventions.

Smith wrote more distinctive Edisonades in the Skylark series. Besides
him, there's:

Harrison's Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
Campbell's Arcot, Wade and Morey trilogy
Travis Taylor's Warp Speed
Kooisra's Dykstra's War
Varley's Red Thunder
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

On Monday, May 1, 2023 at 5:19:05 PM UTC-4, Jack Bohn wrote:
> Among the things Don wrote:
> > A couple of earlier threads are resurrected herein due to renewed
> > interest in _Edison's Conquest of Mars_.
> >
> <whew> I had thought Nicoll had reread the whold thing and dashed a column out at inhuman speed.
> >
> > Someone, Jack Bohn perhaps, previously pigeonholed _Conquest of Mars_ as
> > an Edisonade.
> To me, it sounds like like somethng I could possibly say, but would be unlikely to.
> (I knew of a "Robinsonade" as in _Robinson Crusoe_ and that Swiss Family.)
>

..
I try not to get that mixed up with this stuff:

https://www.robinsonssquash.co.uk/ {No relation}

> I see above I ascribe to Ray Cummings an honor I recently gave to Ray Palmer.
> How ChatGPT of me. I'm going to assume the earlier me had the book to hand.

Kids would use "Crusoe" as a jibe in the schoolyard. How was that an insult?
"Where's Friday?" earned "I gave him the day off" or "Right before the weekend
where we always keep it." {Or it did on the stairs...}

"I guess that makes you Gilligan...." was another one.

--
Kevin R

Kevrob wrote:
> On Monday, May 1, 2023 at 5:19:05 PM UTC-4, Jack Bohn wrote:

> > (I knew of a "Robinsonade" as in _Robinson Crusoe_ and that Swiss Family.)
> >
> Kids would use "Crusoe" as a jibe in the schoolyard. How was that an insult?

"It was a rooster, but we called it a robin's son, because it crew so."

--
-Jack

On Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 12:11:51 PM UTC-4, Don wrote:
> Jack Bohn wrote:
> >>
> >> Someone, Jack Bohn perhaps, previously pigeonholed _Conquest of Mars_ as
> >> an Edisonade.
> >
> > To me, it sounds like like somethng I could possibly say, but would be
> > unlikely to. (I knew of a "Robinsonade" as in _Robinson Crusoe_ and
> > that Swiss Family.)
> >
> Indeed. How ChatGPT of me to assume you said it. (And how human of
> ChatGPT in turn (as Christian more-or-less noted elsewhere) to "fake it
> til you make it."

It strikes me that the major hurdle in acquiring this specific knowledge would be actually knowing it exists.
Then the difficulty is finding the related reading, until you run across a word someone has coined for it, which, if it has caught on, eases your search.

> Smith wrote more distinctive Edisonades in the Skylark series. Besides
> him, there's:
>
> Harrison's Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers
> Campbell's Arcot, Wade and Morey trilogy
> Travis Taylor's Warp Speed
> Kooisra's Dykstra's War
> Varley's Red Thunder

Do we count short story series, such as the Gallegher stories of Kuttner/Moore, or the Professor Manderpootz stories of Weinbaum?

Smith's "Spacehounds of IPC" is perhaps more a Robinsonade than an Edisonade, in that our hero has to recreate rather than invent the entire technological base to repair his spaceship. I don't even think he had to trial-and-error any steps.

(I have notes towards a book review that perhaps stretches the definition of Robinsonade into a generational saga.)

--
-Jack